Saturday, January 22, 2005

I started writing tonight...

I told Vicky I have to write. There's a panic to my writing - a feeling of urgency. I'm writing like a man drowning, flailing his arms and legs, only I am flailing verbs and nouns.

Here's something I wrote tonight. I rather like it.

This is what I know.

There are writers and there are people. Writers write and people shit. It’s all the same.

People shit because their bodies have processed nutrients and stuff and passed them through organs that extracted every bit of goodness until all that was left was waste. This waste is excreted through their assholes in the form of shit.

Writers write because their minds have processed life and experiences and passed them through hours of self-absorption that extracted every bit of goodness until all that was left was waste. This waste is excreted writing in the form of a story.

Like I said, it’s all the same.

Writers don’t write because they experience some grand epiphany or because they suffer some horrible heartbreak or because they live some incredible adventure. Writers write because they need to shit.

Therefore, whenever you hold a book or an essay or a poem, what you are actually holding is shit.

Here’s my shit.

With any luck, I’ll be able to sell this shit and make a great deal of money off of this shit and people will make a movie of my shit and people will watch my shit. They will watch my shit on immense screens where actor will portray my turds and they’ll eat popcorn and drink soda and they, too, will need to shit.

When I was a boy, my mother used to say, when I said that I needed to write, “I hope you have fun.” This was an absurd statement because writing was the equivalent act, for any writer, to shitting. It would make as much sense to tell anyone going into a bathroom to “have fun”. There are a lot of ways to have fun in a bathroom but for most people, outside of some fetishists, shitting is not one of them.

Writers are painfully proud of their shit, almost as much as someone who has just dropped an enormous, foot-long turd. And just as that depositor would do, they go to their friends and they say, “Look at this! Look at what I’ve made! Have you ever seen anything like it?” And most of their friends reply, “No. I haven’t. That’s really something.” But just like the friends of the turd’s creator, they’re just being polite.

And, so, here’s my shit. I hope you enjoy my shit. Like my shit. Even re-examine my shit or share my shit with your friends. I’m bound to have more shit in the future.